The Caveman at the Gym

Some years ago I caught a mouse and kept him as a pet for a few months before letting him go. He lived in a large aquarium that contained the usual mouse furnishings. The highlight for him was a running wheel—the mouse version of a treadmill. Every night without fail he ran for a minimum of four hours. Sometimes it was five or six.

I used to wonder why he did it. Was he in it for the weight loss? Unlikely. Did he really think he was getting somewhere? I doubted that, too. He’d run for brief bursts, maybe 15 seconds, stick his head out of the wheel and look around, then go back to work. He never got anywhere, but it never seemed to bother him. He just kept running.

Incredibly, he never once complained. If he felt any boredom while he logged his miles, he kept it to himself. Why can’t we humans be more like mice, running happily in place? Why do we get so bored running on treadmills?

The field of evolutionary psychology offers some answers. Evolutionary psychology looks at the natural history of our species and asks how the adaptations made by our distant ancestors might affect us today. For better or worse, we carry many of those traits, both physical and mental, with us into the modern world. Some of them help us out quite a bit. Others can get in the way.

Try to imagine our ancestors, maybe a quarter of a million years ago, living in the Pleistocene age. Remember, they didn’t just skulk around gathering berries. It was a tough, competitive world out there, and there were at least two reasons why they might have done some running. One was to chase after dinner; the other, to avoid being dinner. Everybody had to eat in the Pleistocene, and our ancestors were as tasty a morsel as any.

We’re still running today, but the reasons have changed. Our dinners come precaught and packaged and, unless you live in a very bad neighborhood, nobody is trying to turn you into his supper. Sometimes we run trying to catch a bus, but otherwise we tend to run largely for sport or fitness.

Chasing your prey across the African savanna is quite different than running to lose weight or train for a race, or working up a good sweat to keep fit. That leads to two big differences between running then and now. First, our ancestors ran across a varied terrain. The scenery changed as their hearts and legs pumped. The trees, ground, and sky all looked different with movement, and the rate of change corresponded to how hard they ran.

That stimulus change is a natural consequence of running. When it does not occur on a treadmill (i.e., when we get nowhere with all that effort), well, it feels wrong. Hundreds of thousands of years of physical and mental expectations are being violated. We may experience that mismatch as “boredom,” but it can also be viewed as our senses missing what our species has always associated with movement. Maybe those pulsating earbuds or CNN news crawls are a modern way to compensate for the missing stimulus change in the gymnasium landscape.

The second difference between modern running-in-place and its Pleistocene precursor has to do with goals. Back in the old days our goals were clear and could be immediately met. Killing an animal meant dinner. “I’m home, darling, with 10 pounds of meat. Light the fire. And while we’re waiting for it to reach 450 degrees, come and light my fire.” Don’t snicker. That’s how you came to be. You are descended from good hunters who knew how to run, hunt, and fill their spare time with snuggling.

In fact, the Pleistocene age was full of simple, measurable results: Providing dinner. Getting home before dark. Avoiding a predator. Today, the goals we bring to the gym tend to be more abstract and lacking in immediate feedback. Weight loss? Fitness? Training for a marathon? On a daily or moment-to-moment basis these outcomes are nearly invisible.

True, we may enjoy that endorphin rush or the knowledge that we are doing something healthy, but those aren’t “goals” in the sense of food or survival. And success may take months to see. Who can blame a runner on a treadmill for feeling bored? Can you imagine your caveman ancestor doing all that work to bring down a woolly mammoth and having to wait four months for dinner?To make matters worse, we live in a society that primes us for immediate gratification. When we don’t get it, one of the things we experience is “boredom.”

The good news is, it doesn’t need to be this way. Running on the treadmill doesn’t have to feel boring, even though you’re not running for survival.

The key is mindfulness.

It’s doubtful that early hominids spent much time in self-reflection. But cavemen probably were mindful, out of necessity, while pursuing and being pursued. To stay alive they needed, at the most basic level, to be attentive to running speed, pace, and stamina. They had to listen to their bodies.

Today, we don’t have to. So we don’t. It’s not just in the gym where we ignore ourselves and require external distractions. Even at dinner it’s not uncommon to be texting rather than interacting with the people at our table. It’s not surprising that a treadmill run can feel excruciating.

Many of us no longer realize that there is a lot going on inside us. This interior world is a natural antidote to the boredom we experience on the treadmill. But it requires us to plug into ourselves to reap the benefits.

The next time you’re on the treadmill, be mindful. Pay careful attention to your body. How does your foot feel as it comes down with each step? Does the position of your arms cause tension in your shoulders? Is your breathing shallow or deep?

Don’t be discouraged if this is difficult at first. As with any new skill, it takes practice to master being mindful. But it’s worth it. Mindfulness yields immense health benefits, even beyond stress reduction. You’ll be doing a good thing for yourself, and your nervous system will get a break from the bombardment of lights and sounds that have become a regular, and draining, part of our lives.

You may never feel quite as content on a treadmill as that mouse was on his wheel, but with time you’ll get closer. Even if, according to your senses, you’re getting nowhere at all.

Hank Davis is a professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and the author of Caveman Logic.Yana Hoffman is an artist and therapist using mindfulness training as part of her practice in Toronto and Guelph.

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